Episode 64: A Conversation With Liz Lerman - Ch. 2

In Episode 63 of Change the Story / Change the World, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer, teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. In this Episode, (64) we hear about Wicked Bodies, her latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches.

Special Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for their support of Liz Lerman's work and the use of an excerpt from the Wicked Bodies trailer.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others.

Called by the Washington Post “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,”[4] she and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers.[5] In 2002 she won the MacArthur Genius Grant;[6] in 2009, the Jack P. Blaney Award in Dialogue acknowledged her outstanding leadership, creativity, and dedication to melding dialogue with dance, and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.[7]

She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman passed the leadership of her company to Cassie Meador;[8] the company is now called simply Dance Exchange.[9] .[10]

Under Lerman's leadership Dance Exchange appeared across the U.S. in locations as various as the National Cathedral,[11] Kennedy Center Opera House,[12] and Millennium Stage,[13] Lansburgh Theatre,[14] Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center,

In Episode 63 of Change the Story / Change the World, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer, teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. In this Episode, (64) we hear about Wicked Bodies, her latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches.

Special Thanks to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for their support of Liz Lerman's work and the use of an excerpt from the Wicked Bodies trailer.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, teacher, and speaker. She has spent the past four decades making her artistic research personal, funny, intellectually vivid, and up to the minute. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to everyone from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and experiences that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others.

Called by the Washington Post “the source of an epochal revolution in the scope and purposes of dance art,”[4] she and her dancers have collaborated with shipbuilders, physicists, construction workers, and cancer researchers.[5] In 2002 she won the MacArthur Genius Grant;[6] in 2009, the Jack P. Blaney Award in Dialogue acknowledged her outstanding leadership, creativity, and dedication to melding dialogue with dance, and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award.[7]

She founded the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and led the company's multi-generational ensemble until July 2011, when Lerman passed the leadership of her company to Cassie Meador;[8] the company is now called simply Dance Exchange.[9] .[10]

Under Lerman's leadership Dance Exchange appeared across the U.S. in locations as various as the National Cathedral,[11] Kennedy Center Opera House,[12] and Millennium Stage,[13] Lansburgh Theatre,[14] Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center,[14][15] Harvard University,[16] and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.[17][18]

Lerman's early work was strongly associated with the inclusion of older people alongside more traditional young performers,[19] and with the use of personal narrative.[4] 

Liz Lerman: I help others when they come to me and ask. I work in this country and abroad in settings that continue to forge my thinking, make me bolder, and let me interrogate the next generations of artists. It is wide open at the moment. I am a little frightened, a lot more curious, and full of wonder and grief as I gaze around me.”

– Liz Lerman

Change the Story / Change the World EP: 63, Liz Lerman shared stories about her early years and her creative path as a choreographer teacher, and as a lifelong practicing heretic. She also talked about hiking, the horizontal, the critical response process, challenging the Canon, the Heisenberg Uncertainty and how dance can help make the world a better place.

Heisenberg Uncertainty: n quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities[1] asserting a fundamental limit to the accuracy with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position, x, and momentum, p, can be predicted from initial conditions.

Wicked Bodies, Liz Lerman’s latest work, exploring the ugly, the beautiful, and the sublime embedded in the age-old story of witches. 

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts YBCA was founded in 1963, as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. YBCA’s work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the community it serves.

Christine Blasey Ford: is an American professor of psychology at Palo Alto University and a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine.[4] She specializes in designing statistical models for research projects.[5] During her academic career, Ford has worked as a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine Collaborative Clinical Psychology Program.[6]

In September 2018, Ford alleged that then-U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in Bethesda, Maryland, when they were teenagers in the summer of 1982.[7] She testified about her allegations during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing regarding Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination later that month.[8]

Witches & Wicked Bodies An 2013 exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art that provided a rich survey of images of European witchcraft from the ancient world to the present day. Witches, even in biblical and classical times were predominantly women and the misogynistic narratives of their wickedness and lewdness propounded by clerics in books such as the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches),1486 resulted in enduring stereotypes that were imaginatively re-invented by artists over the centuries.  

Johannes Kepler: was a German astronomer, mathematician, astrologer, natural philosopher and writer on music.[5] He is a key figure in the 17th-century Scientific Revolution, best known for his laws of planetary motion, and his books Astronomia nova, Harmonice Mundi, and Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae. These works also provided one of the foundations for Newton's theory of universal gravitation.[6] 

In 1615, 24 witnesses accused Katharina Kepler, the astronomer’s mother, of being a witch. Because of these charges and others, the elderly Katharina was chained to the floor of a prison cell, where she was watched by two guards. Kepler, then the imperial mathematician to Emperor Rudolf II, took over his mother’s legal defense, not realizing the case would go on for six years. Katharina’s story is the subject of a new book, The Astronomer and the Witch (Oxford, 2015), by Cambridge professor Ulinka Rublack.  

 “cultural humility” : To enter my relationships with my students who come from other cultures with my neighbors, my colleagues. I wish I knew all that I could know about their histories, but I don't. And so, and I can study, but that won't make me know it.So, humility seems to me. A space where, settle back, be gentle, be curious. Assume you're not the only person in the world and that not knowing is the best way to be. -- Liz Lerman

Hiking the Horizontal: Liz Lerman’s 2021 book offers readers a gentle manifesto to bring a horizontal focus to bear on a hierarchical world. This is the perfect book for anyone curious about the possible role for art in politics, science, community, motherhood, and the media. 

Dance Exchange: “A place I think of as a think tank and action lab, a place that has been my home and home to many others since I established it in 1976.” Mission: Fueled by generosity and curiosity, Dance Exchange expands who gets to dance, where dance happens, what dance is about, and why dance matters.

senninbari: (千人針, "thousand person stitches) or one thousand stitch is a belt or strip of cloth stitched 1000 times and given as a Shinto amulet by Japanese women and imperial subjects to soldiers going away to war. Senninbari were decorated with 1000 knots or stitches, and each stitch was normally made by a different woman.[1][2]  

The Atlas of Creative Tools is a work in progress developed by Liz Lerman and her colleagues at Arizona State University.  This selection of creative tools helps you practice ways of working with memories, exploring identity, making new connections, and engaging with curiosity.

Legacy Unboxed, “We're just looking at the wildness of being this age and all the wild ways we wanna be in the world and what we wanna do about that and how we wanna handle.” Liz Lerman.

She Said s a 2022 American biographical drama film directed by Maria Schrader and written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, based on the 2019 book of the same title by reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey. The film stars Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan as Twohey and Kantor, respectively, and follows their New York Times investigation that exposed Harvey Weinstein's history of abuse and sexual misconduct against women.

Demon Copperhead: s a 2022 novel by